One night after first arriving in Parliament, Preston Manning forgot an important item on his desk inside the House of Commons chamber. It was 11 p.m. by the time he got back to the Hill to retrieve it. But instead of grabbing the item and bolting back into the night, he sat down in the dimly lit room and imagined what Ottawa would be like if his fledgling party could reform it.

“I was more conscious of how peaceful and tranquil and conducive to thinking it was when there was nobody in it, as compared to the franticness of Question Period, that 15-minute ‘where’s the preamble to my question? Is that the same one we talked about?’” he said in an interview Friday from Vancouver.

In today’s federal politics, short plane trips have replaced two-day train rides where ideas came to life. The 24/7 news cycle now requires a response within hours of a scandal break or else you’re accused of dragging your heels.

What Mr. Manning is calling for is a little more patience, and not just in politics. It’s a virtue that has been dying out in our high-speed culture, eroded by our reliance on the Internet, gnawed away at by our smartphones and tablets and by our busy lives. This shift toward impatience has made it harder to wait in a lengthy coffee shop line, easier to lose our cool and more prone to making mistakes that could have lasting effects.

“It’s legitimate to take this time to slow the pace down,” said the president and CEO of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, which just officially opened its doors in Calgary this week. “You’re not a slacker because you’re doing it.”

This sweeping lack of patience in Western society is coming at a cost, a growing chorus of slowness advocates argue: It not only frays our relationships and wears on our health, it leads to a proliferation of quick fixes to problems in everything from politics to healthcare to sports teams to businesses.

“As a society and as a culture, we’ve lost the art of patience and we’ve been losing it for some time,” Carl Honoré, the Canadian author of the forthcoming book The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed, said in an interview from London, U.K.
“It’s gone so far that the very idea of patience or having to exercise patience is seen as being a bad thing. The waiting, the delay of any kind, is seen as a pejorative.”

Humans are wired to favour the fastest and easiest route to an answer, but our culture’s accelerated preference for speed has been on an uptick since the Industrial Revolution and on overdrive since the advent of the Internet, Mr. Honoré writes.

“Because the world has become more complex, that means quick fixes are even less effective than they were in the past,” he said. He points to Bill Gates’ well-intentioned 2005 challenge to get the world’s scientists to come up with solutions to massive global health problems in record time. Five years on without much progress, the Microsoft magnate confessed “we were naive when we began.”

Mr. Honoré also looks at how Toyota once had even the lowliest workers pull a cord that would stop the assembly line and kickstart a problem-solving process when something went awry, but abandoned the careful oversight process in a bid to become the number one car-maker in the world. The approach backfired. After the devastating Valdez oil spill in 1989, Exxon set out to identify every tiny problem with its company, eventually clawing its way to success and maintaining a permanently cautious philosophy. On Friday, Exxon Mobil became the world’s most valuable company, as Apple — a symbol of today’s lightning-speed world — saw its shares sink.

Even the author’s own experience with back problems conveyed the quick fix pattern — while his acupuncturist said he’d need at least five sessions to get to the root of his troubles, Mr. Honoré cancelled his second appointment because he felt fine. He was back with worse pain a few months later.

“We glorify and put on a pedestal the idea of being constantly active,” said Mr. Honoré, whose star rose after his 2004 book In Praise of Slowness became an international bestseller and helped popularize counter-cultural responses to demands on our time, such as slow food and yoga. “I think patience is a challenge to that whole cultural moment or paradigm. It’s a difficult one to swallow because we’ve become so marinated in this culture of speed, busyness, distraction, multi-tasking — we’ve become, in effect, speed junkies. And like any kind of junkie, when you ask a junkie to give up his fix, the withdrawal symptoms come in.”

‘People have less patience as you get used to things going quicker, there’s a rush in that, a new sense of expectation’

In Calgary, Brian Beck is taking his time reinventing the beloved but bankrupt Chocolaterie Bernard Callebaut and trying to carefully transition the brand so it is henceforth known as Cococo Chocolatiers Inc. Because of the high-profile nature of the bankruptcy and some animosity between the new company and former owners, the Calgary business owner has been under pressure to dazzle. That could be done in a rushed manner, he said, but it would come at a cost.

“I suppose it would seem to others that we might have taken our time on some points, but I think on our side it was really more about having realistic expectations,” he said. “Someone might think ‘Let’s be flashy about this’ and try to do a whiz-bang that makes it turn around overnight. In my business life, I find good value grows incrementally.”

Instead they continued with the Chocolaterie Bernard Callebaut products everyone knows and loves, and are gradually introducing chocolates that have a more modern appeal. And as a fine confectionary, it takes time and expensive materials to make a true gourmet chocolate that will live up to the high standard the brand already had and improve on it.

“Having that type of product at your core,” he said. “You need to do everything right — who you buy product from, you need to have good marketing and so on.”

In her new book On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, Alexandra Horowitz, a psychology professor and canine behaviourist at Columbia University, makes the case for slowing down and paying far greater attention to the details of something as mundane as a walk. The average person misses 80% of what is going on around her, she writes, and we’re often too busy talking on our cellphones or texting or using our Google Maps to see the world unfold.

She walked with a geologist and learned about fossils in the sidewalk, a wildlife researcher to consider the nooks and crannies where raccoons and rats reside, a blind woman who intentionally veered into buildings in order to get a better sense of the space around her and got her companions to deeply describe what they see.

“I never on these walks felt impatient,” Ms. Horowitz said. “What slowing down and looking for something brought to me was not the sense that I was missing out on something, which if somebody told me to put away my cellphone and go for a walk and look, I might say ‘But I’ll miss all these things.’ I love my cellphone, but I didn’t miss it at all.”

David Shenk has thought a lot about the loss of patience in our society and technology’s major role in it. Over a decade after releasing two books — Data Smog and The End of Patience — on the way technology will impact how humans interact, the Brooklyn-based writer has seen a number of his predictions come true: As we get busier, marketers have to do crasser and flashier things to get our attention. Video screens are now seen virtually everwhere, from vehicles to phones to tablets.

“People have less patience as you get used to things going quicker, there’s a rush in that, a new sense of expectation,” he said. “That’s healthy in a certain way if you realize that things don’t have to take as long as they do. If you don’t have to wait two hours in line for tickets, that’s good — it’s two hours you got back. On the other hand, there is something frenetic and manic about just kind of living your entire waking day with the sense that everything you’re doing has to happen quickly, that someone’s expecting you to provide a super quick answer.”

Despite being in a think-tank setting these days, Mr. Manning still needs his escape from the emails, the phone calls, the meetings and policy sessions his centre demands. He finds it at his family’s ranch in Cyprus Hill, Alta. “We have a couple of horses and just the time to think is much greater and much more tranquil,” he said.

And the rest of the time, it helps to remember a little sign his mother — whose husband, Ernest Manning, had a busy life himself as Alberta’s eighth premier — had posted above her kitchen stove.

I agree 100% with the overarching point that Western society has become much more impatient as a whole and that it has been very damaging at all levels.

I don't know if I buy into the premise that technological innovations that allow things to be done faster is the cause of the rise of impatience.

I think there are a variety of different reasons as to why we've seen such a rise in impatience, but for me, the biggest reason is...

The rise of multinational corporations has brought forth a culture of extremely specialized workers who are very detatched from the final product of the jobs they are doing.

Look at my industry... there are people at my company who talk to students, then people who award aid, then people who verify aid, then quality assurance to ensure everyting was done correctly, than audtiors to re-check everything and then there are 9-10 layers of management who are determining policy and drawing up trainings and working with 3rd party auditors and handling everything else.

40 years ago, one person would have done all of those things, and you would have had a manager over the department that would conduct spot audits from time to time. On top of that, you would have accrediators or government employees come in every once in awhile to do a more thorough audit.

Now, we've reached this weird point where instead of one person spending 20-30 minutes to do something and take pride in their final product... we have 6 people spending 2 minutes each to rush through things, and none of them really take pride because if something goes wrong, they can blame one of the 5 other stages.

I know that there is a term for this, but I can't remember what it is. It's basically when people stop really caring about what they are doing, because instead of completing a project, they are only completing a fraction of it... they never get the satisfaction of putting their name on something and making it their own.

I do think that there is a severe lack of ownership and accountability and there are a few reasons for it:

1) People don't judge anymore.

One example of this is Western societies attitude towards divorce.

"Back in the day" (I hate that phrase, but it's apt here), people who went through divorce were shunned.

Was that some of that shunning wrong? Yes, there were definitely some cases of divorce where the husband or wife were completely in the right on requesting the divorce. So the scales started tipping in the other direction and those people who were wrongfully shunned are no longer shunned.

It would be great if it stopped there, but it didn't. The scale kept tipping.

Now-a-days, it seems like a divorce is just a casual conversational point and is oftentimes used as a bonding tool or even a badge of honor.

I think that fathers or mothers who leave their children should be shunned. They shouldn't be celebrated and the whole, "I made a huge error in judgement, my ex was a b----/a--hole" arguement that 90+% of divorcees present shouldn't automatically be taken at face value.

This comes back to personal accountability. Pretty much all of my friends who have gone through divorces blame the other party. No one takes accountability for their own flaws anymore, and part of the reason for this is because society no longer judges.

My wifes older sister has three kids with three different guys... but she's constantly going on dates every weekend. Does anyone really care? Does anyone (outside of me) judge her? Nope, as long as they get what they want, they could care less for her past transgressions. Rather than change, she just continues down the same destructive path because very few people check her or puts her in her place. For every one person like me that does, there's three other people willing to bail her out and give her the benefit of the doubt.

Some people need to fail, which brings me to point 2...

2) It's incredibly hard to truely fail in Western society today

There are so many welfare programs that provide assistance for doing nothing, that it's really almost impossible to truely fail these days.

Back in the day, if you had a bad crop and couldn't food on your table, you starved to death.

Was that good? No, of course people shouldn't starve to death if they do everything right and their crop ends up getting destroyed.

Over time though, the tables have tipped in the other direction and now people who have no excuse for not suceeding are failing just because they don't see the incentive to try. They know that if they go bankrupt, there are programs that will allow them to get back on their feet.

30 years ago, going bankrupt was a shameful act... now, it's a matter of filing some paperwork and then going out and having drinks with your friends to celebrate "the next chapter". No one shames the person who went bankrupt anymore, because most of them probably also went bankrtup.

30 years ago, if you walked away on your mortgage payment on your house, you would be shamed. Now, people do it and they are applauded for "sticking it to the banks".

We've created this safety net culture and way too many people are intentionally falling off the hire wire, because they know they will be scooped up by the net. They view it as a willing tradeoff, rather than a shameful fall.

I could go on and on about this, but I'll wrap it up here. I'm sure that people can pick apart at this, because I really didn't word it in a very tight or concise manner... but that's just the way I feel towards society today.

Very few people judge anymore, and very few people take accountability for their negative actions. I think that if those things changed... our culture would be a much better one.

(I know that is a compeltely different tangent than my initial post, but I think the two tie in together)

Honestly, this is something that I could easily write a 500 page book on... it's impossible to really cover all of my feelings on it in a couple thousand words on a message board.

I'm sure that the speed of filing for divorce, bankruptacy and other things I listed does play a small part in the grand scheme of the downfall of Western society.

However, I think that attitude towards those actions plays a much larger part than just the speed and affordability at which they can be accomplished.

80 years ago, if you turned in s--- work, you got ridiculed and judged (shamefully) for it. Now, people don't care nearly as much.

Oh, I remember the term!

Diffusion of responsibility. There are so many layers and so many safety nets, that failure doesn't really matter anymore.

The "acceptance" movement, while noble at the outset, has really spiraled out of control.

Acceptance basic differences is all well and good, but it does not mean that mediocrity should be accepted and it doesn't mean that nothing is free from judgement. Some actions deserve to be judged by the majority of society. Infidelity, divorce, failure, bankruptacy... those things shouldn't be acceptable as a part of life.

I think I know where youre coming from, but I suspect that your treating symptoms of cultural shifts as a disease.

For example, the assumption behind your thoughts on divorce, is that divorce is a bad thing that shouldn't occur, or if it does, only on rare occasions. But I'm not so sure an unhappy union is in any way a more welcome situation. Indeed, I think just as much misery has been avoided by divorce, despite the misery it causes.

That's not say that I'm dismissing your claim that divorce is way easier to get and there isn't the same level of disdain towards divorcees - because that is true. I'm just not so sure than divorce being more acceptable is a harbinger of doom or a portent of ill.

I think I know where youre coming from, but I suspect that your treating symptoms of cultural shifts as a disease.

For example, the assumption behind your thoughts on divorce, is that divorce is a bad thing that shouldn't occur, or if it does, only on rare occasions. But I'm not so sure an unhappy union is in any way a more welcome situation. Indeed, I think just as much misery has been avoided by divorce, despite the misery it causes.

That's not say that I'm dismissing your claim that divorce is way easier to get and there isn't the same level of disdain towards divorcees - because that is true. I'm just not so sure than divorce being more acceptable is a harbinger of doom or a portent of ill.

I'm trying to think of the best way to word my thoughts on this because I agree with what you wrote as well.

I'll have to come back to this when I've thought about it some more.

It all ties back to diffusion of responsiblity though.

The more society expands and the larger every community becomes... the less people feel responsible for their own actions.

I suppose this does, in a large way, tie into what the author was initially stating.

That's kinda where I thought you were heading - anonymity in larger groups causing a societal disconnect - hidden in plain sight, if you will.

It's akin to the 'village' idea of human interaction.

I do agree with the author of the initial article though, and I think that accessability plays a huge role in things.

We, as a societal whole, are exposed to so much more (positive and negative) than any people living at any other point in recorded human history. I think that it ends up becoming information overload to a certain degree. We're exposed to so much that we lose sight of what is important and what is trivial. Instead, we fall into little niches and establish patterns of routine that are very hard to break.

Show an average person an injustice and they will, oftentimes, work to resolve it. Overwhelm that same person with 10,000 injustices happening at the same time, and it becomes an impossible task to try to right all of them, so they just give up. When presented with that initial injustice from before, they become indifferent to it.

Again, that ties back into diffusion of responsiblity.

When you have a group of 5 people and 1 person is not working towards the goal of survival, it's quite easy to fix.

When you have 500,000,000 people and only 100,000,000 of them are truly responsible for survival and the other 400,000,000 each have a different idea of what the goal should be, it's impossible to pass judgement or blame because negative actions get lost in the midst of even more negative behavior.

I don't know if that makes any sense, it's hard to type it out in a coherent fashion.

I just don't know if it's a lack of patience... as much as it's a feeling of hopelessness/disconnectedness from the big picture that causes so many people to basically give up and let the quality of their output turn to s---.

I do believe that if you sit the average person down and give them a purposeful task, they will be able to accomplish it. People start to stray when they see no value in their task, or when they figure out that their task is in no way essential to survival or well-being.

Meh.. I'm swaying all over the place again. It's really something that is impossible to figure out in a thread on a message board, it's more a topic that hundreds of pages could be written on.

I agree that the initial article was very well written and most of the main points are 100% accurate. I just think it's the tip of the iceburg of a much larger problem.

I just don't know if it's a lack of patience... as much as it's a feeling of hopelessness/disconnectedness from the big picture that causes so many people to basically give up and let the quality of their output turn to s---.

I do believe that if you sit the average person down and give them a purposeful task, they will be able to accomplish it. People start to stray when they see no value in their task, or when they figure out that their task is in no way essential to survival or well-being.